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1. Does image hotlinking help your rankings in Google?

Some
webmaster use a new search engine
optimization practice to get high
rankings on Google. They hotlink
images from other web servers
to rank highly in Google's image
search results.

How does this work?

Google's image search doesn't just return web pages from where a picture originates. For example, the first result for "Darth Vader" returns a BlogSpot web page although the original image is stored on a .hu domain.

Search for any term on Google Images and you'll always find web pages in the results that are just linking to an image from another website.

Why does this help your rankings in the normal Google results?

Google's new Universal Search system now returns images and movies at the top at the search results for some search terms. For example, if you search for "Darth Vader", image results will be the first results in the list.

A click on these images redirects web surfers to the web page on which the image is displayed. If your website has a good ranking in Google Image search then these top rankings might also be displayed in Google's regular results for that search term:

Should you use this new method to improve your search engine rankings?

We do not recommend this new method. It is risky in several ways. If you don't have the copyright for an image, you are not allowed to use it on your own web site.

Hotlinking an image without asking the owner also exposes your site to the risk of defacement. The webmaster of the website that hosts the original image just needs to replace the original image with something rude and it will be displayed on your web site.

"Google continues to dominate, with three-fourths share. For the third month running, Microsoft took one point of share from Google, rising to 6%. Yahoo held steady at 21%. These are very small share changes and should be interpreted accordingly."

"Google is coming out with a new tag called 'unavailable_after' which will allow people to tell Google when a particular page will no longer be available for crawling. For instance, if you have a special offer on your site that expires on a particular date, you might want to use the unavailable_after tag to let Google know when to stop indexing it."

"Yahoo is still treading water as Google zooms further ahead. [...] First, Project Panama, a years long effort to close the gap with Google in search advertising, will begin paying dividends in the second quarter, sooner than previously expected. Second, display advertising [...] would be weaker than expected, wiping out any expected gains from Panama."

"Jakob is called a 'controversial guru of Web design' in Wikipedia. [...] I sound him out on his feelings about the evolution of the search interface, now that with Universal search and Ask's 3D Search we seem to be seeing more innovation in this area in the last 6 months than we've seen for the last 10 years."

As an example, for one of our important keywords, we are listed #5 on Google, #1 on Yahoo, MSN, Alta Vista, and #3 on AOL!!! For another keyword we are #1 on Google and AOL, #4 on Yahoo and Alta Vista, and #9 on MSN. And we didn't have to "BUY" our way into any of the search engines!